Candidate Career Lab Video Series – CV Writing

The key to making your application stand out amongst the hundreds of others is to ensure that your CV is DIFFERENT and MEMORABLE.

Your CV is a reflection of you. Be creative and make it visually appealing so it catches the eye of the recruiter or hiring manager. We have progressed past black and white Word documents – use the likes of Canva.com to download templates that allow you to use colour, pictures and infographics

Keep it short – a CV should only be 1 to 2 pages MAX, so be creative. You have approx 10-15 seconds per page when a recruiter or hiring manager is running their eye over the document for the first time – MAKE IT COUNT

Highlight your key achievements in each of your previous roles. Don’t just copy and paste a job spec into a Duties and Responsibilities section. Use this very limited space to shine a light on what you are most proud of, what your biggest accomplishments were, how this impacted the company or department and use it as an opportunity to sell yourself. Include metrics or financials to quantify them in real business value terms

Use Keywords – they are imperative for getting past the software bots so you can ensure your CV actually makes it to the recruiter inbox, but they also provide an opportunity to highlight the correlation between your experience and what the requirements of the role are. Use emboldening and underlining sparingly but make sure you don’t waste the opportunity to draw the eye to what is important to the recruiter who is looking to fill that role